The traffic in my city is pretty bad. The city government encourages public transportation and carpooling, and my employer has been kicking in money and support to get us to move around smarter too.
One thing my employer just started to pay for our use of Swoop, an app to find single-time carpool buddies. Swoop is kind of like Uber, where the driver is someone who happens to be already going in your direction. Or maybe it’s like digital hitchhiking. Driver gets gas money. Riders get faster routes than taking the bus.
I used it for a few weeks, and met a lot of people like me working in my part of the city. Mostly techy. Men. I got a few surprises, like being picked up in one of those zoomy-fast electric cars, or in an old jeep. One day, my surprise was Sveta.
On this day, I had adjusted my departure time to earlier, because I wanted to be home in time to catch a delivery. I guess that’s how we matched for the first time. The evening-commute deadline came and Swoop paired up drivers and riders, and told us where to be and when. Sveta was to pick me and some other guy and she’d drop us off on her way home.